Civic Impact

A+ Schools, the local educational advocacy group, is looking for 12 dozen volunteers to interview principals and other school officials to find out how well they understand and are helping with issues central to their students' own concerns.

The interviewing project, called School Works, began in 2009 “to understand the opportunities and resources that exist for kids in schools," says Amy Scott, A+'s Research and Data Analysis, "so we can understand better whether there are opportunities and resources that might be contributing to the achievement gap …” by their absence. In previous years project volunteers have interviewed middle-school and high-school principals, counselors and teachers. For this school year, they will target high-school principals, counselors and learning environment specialists – teachers who focus on student behavior in schools and the teachers’ working conditions.

“We're striving to better understand the level of exposure, access and experiences with the issues identified by Teen Bloc,” a student leadership program, which this fall developed a Student Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights asks for everything from the right to free expression and to participate in educational decisions to "equitable academic resources … a socially, emotionally, and physically safe and positive school climate … effective teachers," as well as "positive school disciplinary policies and practices." The student group hopes next that the school board will adopt the bill. They have met with individual members of the board, “and there are school board members who are supportive,” says Scott.

Anybody can be an effective volunteer to conduct the interviews, she adds. "In the past we’ve had concerned citizens, parents, folks who work in education and folks who work in business. It’s a wonderful opportunity for them to visit a school and get firsthand knowledge of how schools are working and being run.”

Sign up now for the training that runs Jan. 23-31. Interviews will be done Feb. 10-21.

For more information on volunteering for School Works, contact Volunteer Coordinator Mollie Pollack at (412) 697-1298, ext. 101.

Before Rebecca Covert founded Firefly Arts, she worked as a storyteller and teaching artist for eight years locally. But when she had a son with an autism spectrum disorder, she discovered a new challenge: "My whole job was to engage children in literacy and math through an arts curriculum," Covert recalls. "But I’d go home and I couldn’t even get my own son to respond.”

Working at the problem, she discovered ways that art could still work “to bring my son out of his shell, build a relationship with us and focus on the world.”

Firefly, currently applying to be an official nonprofit, held its first gathering of families in November. Group members have already provided art activities for Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre's autism-friendly Nutcracker performance, while Covert has been asked to work with autistic kids at a local camp and at various arts organizations.

“We want to build community among families raising autistic children through art activities,” Covert explains. “We’re using arts as an accessible means to develop concept knowledge … which is a difficult thing for autistic children. It’s all about taking an abstract concept and making it a concrete experience.” Some children with autism, for example, may be able to learn gross motor movement as part of a dance but, when asked to make a doll dance, may not be able to make the connection between the two ideas.

Firefly's teaching artists may present movement, visual arts and music to help the kids explore different concepts, such as making friends, riding the bus or figuring out what "our neighborhood” signifies.

Parents will be able to enjoy the program as a stress release, respite, creative outlet and chance to socialize, Covert says. In the proposed 8-week program, while kids work with teaching artists, parents will get such things as cooking classes, yoga and photography courses. "They don’t want to be here and talk about autism," Covert says she found in speaking with parents at Firefly's first event. "They want to be here and meet new people and take a step away” from the very demanding task of raising their kids.

Before its main program is finalized, Firefly artists will be conducting one arts workshop each month, January through March, for whole families, perhaps exploring habitats, such as the ocean and rainforest.

Families can register online to be part of Firefly's programs. The fledgling group also has a Facebook page and an fundraising campaign (with video)

Jazz's legacy in Pittsburgh has inspired Familylinks – which provides family services focused on behavioral, social and developmental health issues – to hold an "up-and-comer contest" for high school and college jazz performers.

Winner of the Just Jazz YouTube Contest will perform as part of Familylinks'
Just Jazz II fundraising event on March 21 at the Twentieth Century Club in Oakland.

“We wanted to do the contest as a way to continue the Pittsburgh jazz history and highlight the contributions of that tradition,” says Mary Bockovich, the group's director of development. And to help make people, particularly young people, aware of Familylinks’ services, of course.

“Young people in general who don’t have a lot of experience with social services or ‘the system’ are probably not aware of what we do,” she says. Familylinks offers drug and alcohol services, programs for young adults and for kids who are homeless or in foster care, workforce readiness training and more.

Government funding for such programs is flat and shrinking, Bockovich notes, so Familylinks is looking for this event to support its Downtown outreach center and shelter for 18- to 21-year-olds. The organization also has a year-old mentoring program for 16-21 year olds who have been involved in child welfare cases, which is looking for assistance. "We’re seeing that kids involved with the child welfare system really haven’t had the benefit of a caring, consistent adult in their lives," she says.

Eligible for the contest are jazz combos that can include a singer; they will be judged by up-to-seven-minute videos submitted by Feb. 1. Just Jazz II headliners Lisa Ferraro and Benny Benack, III will pick five finalists and online public voting will last until Feb. 25. The winner will be announced March 1.

With all the emphasis on helping young people, Bockovich adds, it was natural for Familylinks to want to help young musicians through the new contest: “We would love to give them the opportunity to showcase their talents and to perform for a fairly substantial crowd. They will get some exposure and maybe even a paying gig out of it.”

If it is truly better to give than to receive, here are just three ways during this holiday season that the local philanthropic community is looking for your help. You can honor those who have given and give to those who have the least.

On Dec. 21, at the winter solstice, Operation Safety Net will hold its annual candlelight memorial service to remember those who died while homeless in Pittsburgh in 2013.

The vigil at Fort Pitt Boulevard and Grant Street, underneath the highway overpass, honors the 10 individuals who suffered this fate thus far this year and also marks the longest night of the winter. The service includes music by the Mt. Ararat Baptist Church Men’s Choir and a reading of the names; it is free and open to the public.

Operation Safety Net, part of Pittsburgh Mercy Health System and sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy, has held this service each year since 1998. They will also be collecting new men’s and women’s hats, gloves, and socks for distribution to those whom Operation Safety Net serves at the local Severe Weather Emergency Shelter.

Homelessness is a particular problem among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Pittsburgh's LGBTQ Community Center downtown has also put out an emergency appeal for blankets and coats. In addition, the donations will help low-income members of the community.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Pittsburgh on Dec. 17 will recognize individual volunteers and local organizations that have given the most to the organization this year. Among its Celebrate Coalitions winners this year, to be honored at the James Street Speakeasy in the East Allegheny neighborhood, are:

· Dennis Hazenstab of Lawrenceville, Male Recruitment Advisory Board Member of the Year
· Doug Foster of Wexford, BIG Speakers Bureau Member of the Year
· Jackie Belczyk of the North Side, Young Professional Outreach Board Member of the Year
· Heidi Nevala of Mt. Lebanon, Washington County Advisory Board Member of the Year
· The Saturday Light Brigade and Washington and Jefferson College, both BIG Community Partners of the Year.

Keynote speaker at the event is Emmai Alaquiva, who was homeless at one time in his life but is now director for CBS Sports Network and CEO of the multimedia company Ya Momz House, Inc. He also founded and leads the arts education program Hip Hop on L.O.C.K.

"Values-based leadership," says Greg Crowley, president and CEO of the local Coro Center for Civic Leadership, is all about "aligning your leadership with a higher purpose. It's a kind of leadership that we seek to inspire in people – and that is also inspired by the leadership of Martin Luther King."

That's why Coro is presenting its annual Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Awards on Jan. 24, 2014 at the New Hazlett Theater. The awards honor two individuals in the community (one of whom is a Coro alumnus) and an organization, chosen from among this year's 22 nominees. All of the nominees and winners will have a moment to speak about their work at the ceremony.

"Anybody can be great because anybody can serve," Crowley says King memorably told a Pittsburgh crowd during a visit here in 1966. Values-based leadership is thus not about how competitive the institutions in our region can be with each other or nationally, it's about how the organizations and individuals serve the whole community of people.

The Distinguished Individual Leadership winner this year is Dean Williams, director of the Formerly Convicted Citizens Project. The Project recognizes the huge barriers to employment, housing, even voting – to full citizenship – faced by those once incarcerated, as well as by their families.

Williams began holding workshops for hundreds of people trying to seek a better future after prison by aiming for pardons and expungement of their records. "Those people see him as an inspiration," Crowley says. His "Ban the Box" initiative, looking to eliminate the "Have you ever been convicted?" question from job applications, has been successful so far in changing Pittsburgh's employment forms.

The Distinguished Alumni Leadership Award will go to Tom Baker. "He's a young professional who has been a real inspiration to other young professionals," says Crowley. Baker runs the Pittsburgh Service Summit for those young professionals, as well as college students and leaders in the community, to connect with community organizations offering service opportunities, and he runs the local non-profit organization, Get Involved!, Inc. He is also serving on the North Hills School Board and has written several books.

Gaining Distinguished Organizational Leadership Award this year the Assemble maker learning space for kids in Garfield, run by Nina Barbuto. "Obviously, we have this challenge about how to inspire and teach kids about the arts," Crowley notes. "The committee really liked their catalytic ideas for the community."

"I want people to believe that their leadership is important in making a difference in the direction of our community – not just symbolically, but really," he concludes. "It's possible to have a real impact," especially realizing that most people and groups "started out small, without a lot of advantages. These small organizations and individuals are having an impact and their impact hasn't been fully realized yet.

"The great things we see happening in the community … these things that we feel so good about are occurring because of people who are making things happen on a small scale," he adds. "We want people to walk away thinking 'Maybe I can do more.'"

Court Gould, executive director of Sustainable Pittsburgh, could not be happier with the way the Dec. 10 “Sustainability EXPOsed” event highlighted new ideas for business and the community: "People around the region would be pleased to hear that 500-plus young, emerging leaders and veterans came together to hear one remarkably rapid-paced presentation after another whose focus was on providing up-to-date, eye-popping insights into the ways the practice of sustainability is paving the path to prosperity, public health and access to opportunity at greater levels."

Paul Hawken, author of four national bestsellers, including The Ecology of Commerce and Blessed Unrest, told the crowd that "sustainability goes right to the heart of reinvigorating the Pittsburgh region's story of innovating its way around adversity." Pursuing life, liberty and happiness today, Hawkens added, includes having clean air and water and equitable access to opportunity – qualities not particularly encouraged by our winner-take-all way of conducting commerce.

"There are more evolved models and we need not look very far," Gould points out -- look at our natural eco-systems, he says, "where everything is interconnected and nothing is wasted.

"This is all about our perception," Gould adds. "We can either view climate change as a daunting challenge for which we can do little or we can view it as an opportunity … for us to shift what we value." For our region, this spells opportunities for doing business by emphasizing the local, the collaborative and the interdependent, all toward maximizing social benefit, "where businesses' values come from their role in improving community."

Nature does not negotiate, Hawken concluded, and we fail to appreciate this fact at our own peril.

Projjal Dutta, director of sustainability initiatives for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York, spoke on?“Taking the car out of carbon,” addressing how public transport systems in dense cities improve our quality of life and help us move from sprawl to community building, reducing carbon emissions in the meantime.

Gould says he was also very impressed with Jerry Tinianow, chief sustainability officer for Denver, who "brought home the message of how sustainability at its core is about behavior and choice," and with Jeanne VanBriesen, Carnegie Mellon University professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of their Water Quality in Urban Environmental Systems (Water-QUEST) project. He says she "raised awareness to the literal reality that all water use is highly energy-dependent," and that an efficient use of water resources would be a sign of true sustainability for a region or society.

The audience was also invited to discuss their best recommendations for our region, led by representatives from the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, who, Gould says, will use the discussion to put together their next regional agenda report, due at the end of January.

"Our region has the opportunity to seize being the place the world goes to in order to solve hard problems," was the conclusion of Mickey McManus, CEO and principal of MAYA Design, Gould says. "The Pittsburgh region is uniquely positioned to be the leading site for a shift to building an ecosystem for business based on these concepts of mutuality and innovation … The result can be rising to the top of the economic value chain while achieving a transition to a more functional, sustainable natural systems-based economy."

The Kids+Creativity Network will celebrate its second year with an Assembly on Dec. 12, 3- 5:30 p.m. at the Carnegie Museum of Art. It will be a chance for members of the Network, which aims to remake learning in the Pittsburgh region, to examine what they’ve accomplished individually and as a group.

Cathy Lewis Long, head of the Sprout Fund, which supports Kids+Creativity, will give the state-of-the-Network address, outlining how far the group has come since the last Assembly, including its tremendous growth and the way members have built connections locally and nationally.

She will be joined by Linda Hippert, executive director of the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, who will speak about how her organization, which assists the county’s school districts, has been teaming with those districts to advance teachers’ professional development and update classroom lessons and activities. Thanassis Rikakis, vice provost for Carnegie Mellon University, will talk about CMU’s new initiatives to integrate art, design and technology both at CMU and with their K-12 school partners. Rita Catalano, head of the Fred Rogers Center, will also add her organization's perspective.

They will be followed by brief “ignite talks” by individual Kids+Creativity members – five-minute snapshots of successful programs designed to inspire conversations and motivate members to create new endeavors of their own.

Finally, the Assembly will offer four breakout sessions centered around several key Kids+Creativity topics:

1. Ways to develop partnerships with schools. Ryan Coon, Sprout program officer, notes that “more and more schools are getting involved in Kids+Creativity and are really interested in partnering with members to bring new ideas into their classrooms.”

2. Access and equity for new classroom technology, especially for underserved communities, both in and out of schools

3. How to become a part of the new Remake Learning Digital Corps (see Pop City’s coverage here [http://www.popcitymedia.com/forgood/remakelearningdigitalcorps120413.aspx]); and

4. A hands-on maker activity led by staff from Garfield’s Assemble space.

The Assembly, concludes Coon, "is a good opportunity to see some of the things Kids+Creativity is up to and a chance to make partnerships with some of the network's active members."

The annual compendium, now in its fourth year from the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management at Robert Morris University, brings together some of the best items available as holiday presents from local nonprofits, “so that you can give gifts that mean something," says Center Programs Team Leader Carrie Richards, who put the catalog together with Evening Receptionist David Little.

Among the groups new this year to the catalog is the Balmoral School of Piping and Drumming, which offers The Bagpipers' Hymnal and a Piper's necktie.

"I had never heard of them before, but they're here in Pittsburgh,” Richards says. “The Bayer Center works with mom and pop nonprofits … and I was tickled that they wanted to be a part of it."

Other organizations new to the catalog are Biggies Bullies, which supports and rescues the bully breed of dog and Volunteers of America, which is selling a bracelet to support people with disabilities.

The Union Project, which runs a pottery studio among its projects, is offering The Clay Case this year. "It’s everything you need to work with clay at home with your family," she says. "They're kind of selling you a mess in a kit, which is pretty fantastic."

"The nonprofits are always thankful for the free publicity” of the catalog, she adds. “But I always hear from people: 'It made me feel like I was contributing something in my gift buying.'"

"When you introduce something through art,” says Pittsburgh sculptor Blaine Siegel, “you're opening a different perception, a different doorway. Especially when kids talk about violence, it's just about 'Do this, don't do that.' Not the 'Why?' Art makes you think harder to find meaning. That's when there is a different thought process – kids are more engaged and you get to a much better place."

Siegel, an artist in residence in Wilkinsburg High School during the previous school year, is still working with Wilkinsburg students in an effort to use art to deal with violence. Siegel and his students have created videos and will do readings and musical performances at the Society for Contemporary Craft’s “Enough Violence” exhibition on Dec. 13.

Last year, Siegel converted Wilkinsburg High School’s woodshop into an art studio where, twice a week, 18 students worked with him on his sculptures, then branched out to do their own artwork. He also visited their classes for talks and demonstrations. In an English class studying writers of the Harlem Renaissance, for instance, he added visual art to the mix, guiding students in creating a mosaic, while in a health class studying the respiratory system he helped students sculpt a model of a body with a mechanical lung that inhaled and exhaled, introducing them also to artists who created body-themed.

Wilkinsburg is the most violent high school in Pennsylvania, according to a state study in 2012. "I don't believe it – but the perception exists," Siegel says. He showed his students a speech by Pakistani teen Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban and has since spoken out widely about the violence – and her own reaction to it.

"I started to draw parallels between her and these kids' experiences," Siegel says. He noticed them constantly making music – singing, banging on lockers – "representing the beauty these students are able to create in this atmosphere of violence," he says.

He first approached the school band, which made a video of drumming a Pakistani beat from Malala's region as they walked through school halls.

Then Siegel took a snippet of Malala's speech to the UN, in which she spoke of not wanting to shoot her attackers in revenge, and overlaid it with stills from the school. He asked a group of its students whether they would shoot in revenge for a gun crime, and the majority said yes. Then he played them Malala’s UN speech, and they saw a picture of a girl their age.

"Opinions started to change,” he reports, “and it's interesting to see that happen."

When he took students to view the “Enough Violence” exhibit, which contains a wide range of artistic responses to our society’s violence, they were most affected by the sculpture at the front of the show, which depicts a toddler with a gun holding up fellow toddlers, some in diapers. It started a vital discussion, he says, about nature versus nurture, and how violence is introduced to people at a young age.

"That got a lot of sharing going,” Siegel says. “They're young adults but they're also older kids, so that piece got to them."

He's talking about GlobalPittsburgh First Thursdays, held next on Dec. 5 at Luke Wholey's Wild Alaskan Grille in the Strip District from 5:30 to 8 p.m., then in February and following (after skipping January) at Steel Cactus in Shadyside.

About 150 people from across the globe and the city usually attend, from 37 countries and speaking 27 languages. The crowd, Buell says, includes "a lot of internationals – professionals, students and ex-pats – but also a lot of local people who are interested in learning about the world… They have travelled or they are interested in seeing how global Pittsburgh has become.

"It seems like it's really unlike a lot of networking, where people know each other," he adds. "This one, you can walk up to any table and introduce yourself. It's really friendly and welcoming.

Through this "citizen diplomacy," Buell says, the confluence of people can do things "the diplomats in Washington can't really achieve."

A hundred years ago, he notes, 33 percent of Pittsburghers were born outside the U.S. In recent years, that has fallen as low as four percent. Currently, it is around 10 percent. "This is a way to make Pittsburgh more welcoming and inclusive for people who live here, not just for newcomers," he says. "The visitors who come in learn from Pittsburgh but we want to make sure that Pittsburgh … learns from the people we bring in.

Register here for the event, which is free for GlobalPittsburgh members and $5 for others, and includes complimentary appetizers, prize drawings and more.

The Sprout Fund is looking to recruit up to 30 members of a new Remake Learning Digital Corps: technologists, university students, out-of-school-time teachers, makers, or "anyone interested in promoting and helping teens and tweens learn digital literacy," says Ani Martinez, a Sprout program associate who is coordinating the Corps.

Martinez says there are many tech programs that could use no- to low-cost tools in for their students but don't have the time or resources to train their own experts. “It's been a growing concern for connected educators for a long time," she says, referring to connected learning: the notion that young people learn better when they work with their peers, are personally interested in a subject and connect with the larger community.

The new Corps will be a travelling educational force, she says: "Hopefully, it will become a self-sustaining training platform that can be used with any educational site."

Corps members will learn Scratch, a programming language tool, and Thimble, developed by Mozilla as a way to learn coding. From there, Corps members can help students do everything from exploring Java to building hardware devices and apps, including working on a Hummingbird robotics kit, which teaches kids about circuits, lights, and motion.

Applications to be an instructor or site for the program close Dec. 20 and are available here. Sprout is looking 5-10 sites to deploy its first teachor-mentors.

"The hope," says Martinez, "is that [students] gain an interest in building and teaching themselves hardware and the Web at large – the 21st century communication skills and job training skills. If they can, early on, they will have a tremendous leg up when they reach the workforce."

Pittsburgh Community Kitchen has been quietly working since July to create a catering business that provides food-service training to people who often have the toughest time getting a job: those reentering society from jail, people who have experienced recent homelessness, and individuals recovering from drug and alcohol abuse or who have experienced behavioral health issues.

"And it's often more than one" issue that their clients are getting past, says Jennifer Flanagan, who founded the Kitchen along with Tod Shoenberger, an executive chef with 20 years of operational experience in the food industry. “Food service is a really forgiving industry,” Flanagan says, “if you are responsible and have some skills,” and the Kitchen will offer "more than job readiness – industry-specific training."

Flanagan works for Allegheny County’s Department of Human Services, where she co-directs a Department of Justice-funded program offering workforce development for former inmates, so she has important experience creating such a program. And there are 42 other community kitchens with similar missions in the national Catalyst Kitchens Network, which originated in Seattle.

The Kitchen has already undertaken catering jobs for nearly half a year. "You can't really train people if you're not running the business well," she says. The free program uses chefs as teachers and also offers clientele access to case managers to provide extra support and make referrals to social-service agencies. "Our goal is to get them through the their barriers and stabilized" in life, she explains.

To accompany the training experience, which begins with the new year, the Kitchen already has a shared-use commercial kitchen in Pittsburgh Public Market’s recently opened Penn Avenue location. There, they’ll also train participants in co-packing: working with smaller food producers to produce their products and/or pack them for sale.

In addition, the Kitchen is planning a restaurant – at a location to be determined – that will “make the restaurant experience available to folks who couldn't necessarily support it,” Flanagan says. They’re also expecting to put a 10,000-square-foot commissary kitchen, using green technology, in the Energy Innovation Center opening in the Hill District in late 2014.

”We're looking to do other things to support whatever communities we go into," she adds, such as making meals from the 30,000 pounds of end-of-shelf-life produce tossed by food banks every month.

Concludes Flanagan: "I'm excited to start the training in January, and see where it takes us."

Getting kids to encourage their classmates to stop stigmatizing mental health issues is somewhat uncharted territory, which is one of the reasons Pittsburgh Cares is teaming with Allegheny County to devise new school-based programs around this issue.

The program, Stand Together, began a few weeks ago with workshops in 10 area schools: Pittsburgh's Perry and Allderdice high schools and the Environmental Charter School, Propel Braddock Hills, South Allegheny Middle School, South Brook Middle School, South Park High School, Woodland Hills Junior High School and West Mifflin Area middle and high schools.

Working with the county's Office of Behavioral Health in the Department of Human Services, Pittsburgh Cares devised an initial full-day workshop in which the students learn about both mental illness and the stigma that often goes along with it.

Nationally, says Holly McGraw-Turkovic, program director at Pittsburgh Cares, 16 percent of school-age kids with mental illness will think about suicide, with up 44 percent of them dropping out of school, while about two thirds do not even receive treatment. “There’s a lot of myths out there connected to mental illness,” says McGraw-Turkovic. “Stigma comes from students being isolated."

During the first workshop, students also paint an "awareness icon" – a mannequin that they cover with positive messages about mental health issues. The second workshop uses Pittsburgh Cares' strength as a nonprofit affiliate of the national HandsOn Network – creating service-learning projects – and focuses it on the subject of mental illness stigma. The kids will brainstorm project ideas, then apply for the organization's mini-grant program for $100-$1000 to fund each project.

At the Stand Together website, the organization will be posting project ideas and guides, local connections and educational material on the issue, mental health fact sheets and a photo collections from finished projects, as well as a blog and project assessment tools.

South Allegheny is the only school so far to have completed its second workshop, and ideas for effective programs may be tough to devise, McGraw-Turkovic notes. There weren't many successful national programs to use as models, she says, so the pilot year of this two-year program will be testing how much kids' attitudes and knowledge have changed from its effects.

“We’re hoping in two years we can share this model with all our HandsOn affiliates across the country," she says, "giving them all the tools they need to replicate this program.” Stand Together was funded by a $105,000 grant from the Staunton Farm Foundation.

It's not unusual for a nonprofit to engage in social enterprises, or to raise money through side businesses, but it's probably unusual for that business to be catering.

That's what Community Human Services has been developing for the last year. The Oakland nonprofit already serves half-price lunches for those in need in its Bite Café on Lawn Street, dishing out about 5,000 a year. With their chef and executive staff aiming to cook up healthy fare for the neighborhood, Director Of Community Programs Trevor Smith said the organization decided it was time to take their talents to a wider audience.

The café, Smith says, provides " a chance to make some folks get a hot meal and have a chance to socialize.” However, he adds, "we honestly lose money for each meal that we sell" there. With Bite Catering, the organization is trying make the café services self-sustaining.

“Food is a common theme of what we do,” Smith notes, since the group also runs a food pantry and a second kitchen. “So it fits in with the character of the agency.”

So far, Bite has catered lots of meals for a number of other nonprofits – for meetings of 10 and dinners for 100, from the United Way and Forbes Funds to neighborhood churches and groups. Now they are trying to build up their business among for-profit companies as well.

“Nonprofits are or should be looking for ways to generate funding” from nontraditional sources, Smith says. “It certainly requires that our team work harder but by no means is it beyond their capacity.”

His hope for Bite Catering, he concludes, “is that it is able to fund in its entirety the lunches, and that we do an excellent job of catering, that we do great food and great service … If we can do that, the money for lunches will fall into place.”

“The largest percentage of individuals who are experiencing homelessness are children – they far outnumber those individuals you see on the street,” says Bill Wolfe, executive director? of the Homeless Children's Education Fund? in the Strip District.

The latest federal stats show there are nearly 1.2 million homeless kids in the U.S. More than 1,700 of them are in Allegheny County. “That is a number that continues to grow,” Wolfe says.

And the problem is spread throughout the area, too: “A lot of people think that homelessness and poverty in general is just an urban problem. But there are 43 school districts in Allegheny County and every one of them has children experiencing homelessness. The only way we are going to break this cycle of homelessness is education.”

That's why the Homeless Children's Education Fund has services in all 27 county agencies that serve the homeless – 20 shelters and seven places that provide services during the day. “We have become the educational wing for those 27 facilities," Wolfe says.

Founder Joe Lagana, the retired head of the local Allegheny Intermediate Unit, "visited some of the shelters and agencies, and he noticed that when the kids came [there] they were basically put in front of a television set," Wolfe says. "The agencies didn’t have anybody to do [education] and the moms and dads were struggling with their own issues.”

In 17 of the facilities, the Fund has built learning and resource centers with computers and spots for kids to do homework. It provides tutors and volunteer mentors to work with kids after school and pays reading specialists to work on literacy issues. It brings in art, music and language lessons as well as artists to work with the students.

“Those portions of our programs really work to get the parents involved in the educational process with the children,” he says.

The Fund also provides books and schools supplies. Each August, with the help of Citizens Bank, the Fund distributes 2,500 new backpacks filled with age-appropriate school supplies.

The Fund is always looking for people to spread the word about the need in our community, and for volunteer help" “We are in constant need of volunteers to go in and work with children in the shelters. We will take one day a month if that is all you can give.”